


Torchwood Character Portraits - Short Pieces

by azn-jack-fiend (ajf)



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-02
Updated: 2011-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-13 00:58:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/131044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ajf/pseuds/azn-jack-fiend
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is where I'm filing short character portraits of under 500 words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Four Reasons Diane Flies, and One Reason She Can't Stop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for [tw_femficfest](http://community.livejournal.com/tw_femficfest/profile) for [](http://mcparrot.livejournal.com/profile)[**mcparrot**](http://mcparrot.livejournal.com/). Prompt: "Exploration of Diane. What made her decide to be a pilot? What had happened in her life? She was made of pretty amazing stuff to be willing to fly off into the unknown like that." Beta by [](http://heddychaa.livejournal.com/profile)[**heddychaa**](http://heddychaa.livejournal.com/)

 

 **Phantasia**

Diane attacked the cliff face, squirming her trembling fingers into salt-crusted jagged pockets and jerking herself upwards into the warm feel of the sun on her shoulders. The boys who’d dared her were screaming on the beach; the roar of the waves drowned their words.

She crawled up onto the high ledge and finally opened her eyes. Air, just clean air, and noise, and pounding sunlight. A white bird stiffened its wings and rested on the wind, suspended in perfect tension, almost close enough to touch.

It took her parents four frantic hours to get her down. Everything changed, afterward.

 **Eros**

The RAF airshow had set her on fire. She tossed in her bed, tormented by Tiger Moths.

Diane thought of boys her age, schoolboys with delicate birdlike faces and cruel lips, and the buzzing loops of the Tiger Moth biplanes, and her own womb, kicking against her. Hysteria, the doctors called it.

She reached between her legs and _drove_ herself. The release came slowly, way too slowly.

But there was no point in desperation, because the Vibro-Electra Massage Unit never failed. She plugged it in, took hold of its metal handle, thought of riding Tiger Moths... and this time, flew.  
 **  
Phobos**

"Diane, if you had chosen a more suitable area, I would not be so opposed," said her father, his words melting together into a warm, reasonable rumble. "This is not the time. Your brother is sick, your grandmother is dying, your mother... we need you here."

 _She's been dying my whole life_ , thought Diane, hating herself in silence.

"She's been dying my whole life," she said, out loud.

Her father twisted his lips as if she’d slapped him.

Chained down with her love, their pain. She’d break her own back to get free, the fear was that strong.

 **Eris**

Reggie was light and easy and danced like a champion, and they'd gone more than a few steps beyond kissing, up against his Spitfire in the quiet of the early morning.

In the afternoon, his Captain reported Reggie shot down over France.

There was a raid across the Channel that night. Diane and another WAAF, Betty (her man was flying, _alive_ ) watched the Spitfires rush into the sky.

"Kill as many as you can," said Betty, like a prayer.

Diane wanted to be that death, wanted to come down on the enemy from above. Ride them down, make them pay.  
 **  
Thanatos**

Even before she'd flown through the Rift, she'd heard her death come calling. When a ray of sunlight pierced the cockpit at just the right angle, and she hung suspended in air, in time...

 _There's nothing more perfect than this._

 _If you go down, you will never remember how perfect._

 _Don't go down._

 _Go on._

Diane loved the shiny machines, the shocking abundance of everything, even her crude, elegant-looking man, she loved him too, but all so faintly, because she wasn't real anymore. She was a museum piece.

The voice never stopped now.

 _Go on_.

 

 **  
**


	2. Pilot: Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for [](http://community.livejournal.com/tw100/profile)[**tw100**](http://community.livejournal.com/tw100/) , challenge [reverse fandom: Lost](http://community.livejournal.com/tw100/438628.html).  Prompt: second episode of Lost, "Pilot: Part 2" ****

This is Captain Jack Harkness. If you can read this, you come from the same world.

I'll write this like a combat report, but I can't even start it right: with a date. It's about how my plane was on fire and then I fell through a hole in the universe.  It's about how I met Captain Diane and the others and our spaceship and how we're planning on getting off this junkheap planet we got washed up on. If you can read this, then maybe... you can follow me. If not? No regrets. Use my name. Here it goes.


	3. Perhaps 55%

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for [](http://community.livejournal.com/tw100/profile)[**tw100**](http://community.livejournal.com/tw100/) , challenge: [science hero](http://community.livejournal.com/tw100/420090.html)  
>  ****

Cyberman Studies: it was new, elite, and had a ridiculous mortality rate.  Dr. Tanizaki became the world's leading expert after a harrowing series of experiments in a bunker buried deep below the University of Tokyo. There had been four cyberneticists working around the conversion unit, trying to reverse the process on three howling half-converted, and Tanizaki was the only survivor out of all of them.

The percentages wrote themselves with scalpels and blood.

When he failed to return, his colleagues knew he was dead.  They organized a funeral with an empty casket and remembered him as a fearless, crazy hero.


	4. She's a Knockout

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A fleeting glimpse into a most violent career.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for [](http://tw-unpaired.livejournal.com/profile)[**tw_unpaired**](http://tw-unpaired.livejournal.com/)  and beta’d by [](http://heddychaa.livejournal.com/profile)[**heddychaa**](http://heddychaa.livejournal.com/). **Prompt:** 100\. Alice Guppy before Torchwood (the TW extra material mentions she was arrested for thievery or pick-pocketing or something)

  
The two ladies on the northwest corner of Coster Street appeared to be whipping themselves into a state of frothing fury over the appearance of the third lady on the north-east corner. Heated cries of _'oo does she fink she is_ and _I'll lump 'er one just you watch me_ flew back and forth between them.

She was younger, more neatly dressed, and attempting to undercut them by a shilling.

As soon as the last hansom had cleared the street, they strode towards her, and the few permanent inhabitants of Coster Street pricked up their ears and sharpened their eyes in anticipation of fisticuffs among fallen women, a rare but always amusing spectacle, trade at this corner being more often conducted in a civil fashion.

The dark-haired woman merely smiled at her two assailants, and removed a large, well-honed gaff hook from under the back of her jacket. The distracted, almost vacant smile stayed fixed upon her face as she gave the hook a few experimental, yet obviously proficient swings.

The two ladies turned and ran.

Her smile slid into a charming little pout. She reinserted the gaff hook into the back of her jacket, and resumed her calls for clients.

* * *

  
"This alley is rather dark," chuffed the portly gentlemen who had answered her call.

"But it's the quickest way to the inn," swore the dark-haired lady. She picked up her skirts behind him and swept forward, in effect herding him into the mouth of the shadowy corridor.

"If you say so, my dear." He stumbled onwards, trailing one arm along the wall.

At a point halfway through, she clutched at his arm, arresting his hesitant progress, and let out a faint scream. "There — behind us!"

He peered around.

Having positioned him neatly between herself and the alley wall, the lady swung a roundhouse blow that landed directly in the center of his face. His head rocketed backwards and struck the wall, producing an ominous noise halfway between the crack of an egg and the ring of a bell, then rebounded forwards. By that time, the lady had darted aside, and so he fell flat on his face with yet another ominous noise.

He did _not_ move again.

The lady straddled him and stripped him from his bowler down to his garters, depositing his coin and every other item of worth into her pockets.

She whistled and swung his silver-headed walking cane back and forth, pausing for a second to admire its gleam as she emerged into the streetlight at the other end of the alley.

* * *

  
"Oh Sally darling, I made a rich haul on Coster Street tonight," the lady sang out as she burst through the door of the small flat.

Sally, an elfin-shaped blonde, sat in a chair in the middle of a room, looking nervous and glum.

Two policemen stepped from behind the door.

"Alice Guppy, you are under arrest on account of — put that _down_ , girlie — _hell and damnation_ —"

The gaff hook swung. Screams in both male and female registers echoed within the abruptly chaotic confines of the flat.

Alice Guppy ran out the door, dragging Sally with her.

"Let go," sobbed Sally. "You're _scaring_ me."

"Keep your hair on, Sally," said Alice. She petted Sally's arm as she looked warily toward the flat.

Thus distracted, two more policemen fell upon her from behind and bore her to the ground. Sally ran away and did not look back.

As they hauled Alice into the wagon, she spat a tooth at them, and cursed the laws of man and the wiles of blonde women until they slammed the doors in her face with a final, definitive, unappealable _thud_. The horses strained and the wagon rumbled forward: prison-bound.

* * *

  
 _You, dear reader, from your privileged perch in the timeline, undoubtedly know that Alice Guppy was destined for a stranger fate than that of a common prisoner. Still, put aside your foreknowledge in order to imagine the wretched state, the abject misery, the dolorous moans of this poor en-caged creature._

 _Her luck will improve soon, and you may follow its upward course into Torchwood recruitment in[her short-lived diary](http://www.bbc.co.uk/torchwood/sites/arg/pages/episodes.shtml?folder=tw_case_ep12&tab=2), though an account of how she ended this career is no longer extant. Such ending was most horribly violent, of course. How could it be otherwise? But the gory details must wait, packed away, for another story, and another day._


End file.
